[Frost][Simcraft] Okay, I'm totally lost.

Sorry for this rant, but I'm completely lost on this Simcraft thing. Either I suck (which would make sense) or Simcraft sucks (which would make sense) or both. In the past I've followed Akraens theory of building haste, cause to me it made sense and I was convinced it was the way to go. However, I found out that for my personal playstyle I'm better off with less haste, more mastery and I would get better numbers out of it. This has more to do with the fact that I lack the skills to perform on the level Akraen performs, rather than that I have changed my thoughts on the haste vs. mastery concept. Besides all of this, I don't want to unravel the entire discussion once more, that's not what this post is about.

Today I simcrafted my char as it is. Appearantly, if I were the best frostmage on the planet (elite setting) on a patchwork fight, I would do 300.6k DPS. Fine with me. However, I noticed that SC buffed me with frost armor. Logically, frost runs with frost armor, arcane with mage armor, fire with molten armor, yada yada, but since I was testing out this theory, I wanted to do the same test with mage armor instead of frost armor. I simmed 295k DPS. Also fine with me. Unless I'm moronic, this would tell me that with my current gear I should favor 7% haste over 10-ish% mastery. So, SC would tell me that at this point haste > mastery. I ran the first sim again, 25k itterations, same settings, but with stat scaling analyzis. I got the following stats as a result:

Int SP Crit Haste Mastery
7.83 6.30 3.63 4.80 3.61

So I went back to AMR and entered these values. I hit 'optimize' once more and ran the output trough SC. 297k.
This is the part that confused me. Appearantly at the sim with the stat scaling, the output returned to me said Int > Haste > Crit > Mastery.
However, when I enter these exact numbers into AMR, hit optimize and the SimC button, how could it be that the optimized would do less DPS than my original sim? Also, I ran the same sim settings on the default AMR settings for frost (Int > Haste > Mastery > Crit) and I simmed 285k. That should mean that Mastery is currently more worth than haste. Still, SC says me running Frost Armor over Mage Armor gives me a higher sim result.

Either I'm doing something wrong or I'm completely lost on the concept. The highest sim I've gotten sofar is that 300k on my actual armory import. Everything else sims lower, even tho the stat scaling scream for a change in my approach.

Because SC stat scales are calculated at a point. When you change your reforges even so slightly, the scaling changes too. Which means when you entered your values into AMR, AMR just assumed those scales were relevant all the way, not just at that point. You have to find a balance. I agree that SC should be able to do it for you, but it is what it is right now.

So what would be my step to find out what (in my current spec, with my current gear) would be the absolute optimal stat scaling dpswise? Ironicly, my current gemming/reforging is the exact output I get from AMR when I select the default arcane scales. Sofar they've been (simwise) the best result.

It doesn't have to be that complicated.
Its clear that crit is the worst stat for frost right now so just go to AMR and set it to Haste > Mastery > Crit and then manually reforge some haste into mastery until you feel comfortable.

Both thanks for your replies. Point is, pretty much, that I would like to have it that complicated. Just "comfortable" isn't enough. Maybe I'm overreacting a bit here, apologies in advance, but to me it doesn't make sense to have my gems and reforges in a way that I would loose 2k DPS if I could also have it optimized. Point is, I thought I knew how I would figure that out (by SimC), but clearly that isn't the case. Not trying to offend you (pangya) by the way, just my two cents on the topic.

Sounds like you want to use AMR to optimize gear and Simcraft to obtain the actual DPS. AMR simply isn't going to optimize to the precision you seem to want though. Because it uses fixed stat weights, it doesn't account for the effect that changing one stat has on other stats.

Now, the new item is "Optimal" being that its the highest possible score(+1 from no reforges) for that item with its reforging. This doesn't mean that reforging it gained you 1 dps because the point score went up by 1 they do not go hand in hand. The AMR score is just the summation of all your stats "points" multiplied by their weights that you input into AMR.

Unless they have changed AMR to include a DPS sim as well, which I am pretty dang sure they have not.

There is a simple tool to find the "sweetspots" using SimC. It's called reforge plots. Alternatively, do some plots for the individual stats to see where the scaling changes inclination (hint: its not a kink)

Thanks once more!
So I've ran both reforge plots and clearly it shows me I should reforge mastery into haste.
What I also found out (or already knew) is that the reforge plots differ quite alot, depending on whether I am using NT or using LB.
I switch these two on a fight-to-fight base. Which one to pick? Should I just stick to NT and reforge accordingly? Or should I still use LB even tho I'm reforged for NT?

Thanks once more!
So I've ran both reforge plots and clearly it shows me I should reforge mastery into haste.
What I also found out (or already knew) is that the reforge plots differ quite alot, depending on whether I am using NT or using LB.
I switch these two on a fight-to-fight base. Which one to pick? Should I just stick to NT and reforge accordingly? Or should I still use LB even tho I'm reforged for NT?

Any thoughts?

If you have more than one target, haste will be favoured even more due to NT cleave (if you can cleave) and well, bomb damage. Unless you want to reforge for every boss, just decide on the bomb you want to use (I normally think of which bosses we will be progressing on and if they involve adds of some sort) and then do the reforge plots. I favor NT due to its flexibility in multi-target fights and because I can easily reach a comfortable breakpoint at 145xx haste which doesn't gcd-cap me. This is also what the reforge plot tells me. Strict ST, LB seems to be higher according to SimC (2%), but shows haste=mastery over a range of 125xx-15xxx (approx 1000 dps gain for dropping to 50% haste, but that is not even 0.5%), so just switching bomb won't harm you too much and you are still pretty well off for multi-target fights by not gimping your haste too much. It is not optimal for either, but I am lazy.

I've decided to stick to a 12043 haste point, which benefits both LB and NT under the influence of hero or meta. Still leaves me with pretty much mastery, so guess it would be considered a mastery build.